Abstract: According to the popular behaviors of "over-debt" and "financial conservatism" in Chinese listed companies, the paper classifies the capital structure choice preference into radical capital structure and conservative capital structure. Based on the balanced panel data of yearly financial reports of listed companies in 1999~2003, the paper selects 623 samples, and takes total debt ratio as the proxy of capital structure, and takes size, liquidity of assets, grow opportunities, cash flows as the other variables. With respect to the two sub-samples in which the total debt ratio is more than or less than the mean of the whole sample, the paper builds two groups of multivariate linear regression models, and makes an empirical analysis on the relationship between the capital structure preference and business performance, then tests and analyzes the regression results.

Key words: capital structure choice, preference, business performance, over-debt, financial conservatism